orget for a moment what you know about books and their covers, and consider Faber’s latest anthology with a judicious eye. From the heavy, silky card to the tasteful artwork and the title font’s restrained serif, it’s a masterclass in elegant, unthreatening nostalgia. The illustration (stamped straight on to the boards: no fiddly dust jacket here) is a thing of seemly beauty: a linocut of a spare winter landscape of low hills and bare black trees, richly lit by a brace of pheasants and a spray of red rose hips. We know it’s a British landscape (frankly, we suspect it’s an English one) thanks to the subtitle’s adroit deployment of “the Nation”, and the sense of cosy patriotism is amplified by a discreet tagline in the top-left corner which informs us that the poems are “as heard on Radio 4’s Poetry Please”. This is a book intended for the Christmas market – the what-to-buy-your-aunt-who-likes-poetry market – and the cover does a superb job of reassuring us that nothing contained within it is likely to scare the horses.

The poems themselves make good on the cover’s promise. Nature poems are reassuring by – well, by their nature: for most of us, they are the first poems we encounter (I have vivid memories of making a wall display of Walter de la Mare’s “Silver” with a bunch of other eight-year-olds for our school hall), and we absorb them before anyone has had a chance to explain that, actually, poetry is difficult and impenetrable and not to be trusted. We carry the idea into adulthood that nature is an appropriate subject for poetry, and classroom staples such as “Adlestrop” and “In the Bleak Midwinter” (both included here) soothe us with their familiarity. And if nature poems are reassuring, poems on the seasons are doubly so. No matter what’s happening in your life, there’s comfort to be derived from observing the ebb and flow of spring’s slow swelling and autumn’s gaudy decline; from the reminder that time is cyclical as well as linear, and that change itself is changeless.

It won’t come as any great shock, then, to find that “the nation’s most treasured nature poems” contain few surprises. The contents page reads like a nature-poetry greatest hits: Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight”; Chaucer’s lines on April from the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales; Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love”; Keats’s “To Autumn”. Not that there’s any shame in that: classics become classics for a reason, and poems such as Louis MacNeice’s “Snow” and Philip Larkin’s “The Trees” are enriched, not diminished, by rereading. It’s even possible to make the metatextual argument that, in the case of seasonal poetry, repetition in the form of rereading is a strength; that, just as in the final line of “The Trees” (“Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.”), where every fresh “afresh” is modified by the one before, it’s only by reading poems about time over the course of time that their real significance can be felt. Anyway, the big hitters are interspersed with enough contemporary poems – and lesser-known older ones – to prevent the collection from clotting. Two of the UK’s finest modern nature poets, Kathleen Jamie and Alice Oswald, find a place within its pages, while one of the highlights for me was the winter poem “Pieces of Unprofitable Land” by Molly Holden (“The pieces of unprofitable land / are what I like, best seen in winter, / triangular tail of cottage garden / tall with dead willowherb, and tangled splinter / of uncut copse edging the red-ploughed fields ... ”). Holden was a British poet and the author of four collections; she died in 1981 at the age of 53. Somehow, I’d managed to make it to nearly 40 without reading a single word of hers: an oversight I’ll now be correcting.

This trick of luring you in with the familiar then hooking you with the new is one of the marks of a good anthology, and in that sense, The Seasons is a success. Another mark, though, is the ability to arrange its contents in such a way that the poems lead one from another, and gain resonance from their proximity. On this score, alas, The Seasons fails completely.

The poems here are grouped by season, starting in winter, the chilly kernel out of which the new year is born. It’s a neat framework, and one that reduces the editors’ task to little more than an exercise in joining the dots: placing each season’s poems into sequential order so that, as the readers turn the pages, the earth’s tilting on its axis can be felt. Inexplicably, though, having done everything necessary to produce a book that’s both beautiful and absorbing, if at times slightly pedestrian, they stop short of this final, simple step. Instead, within each season, the poems are arranged alphabetically by title. In an anthology where many of the poems take the name of a month as their title, this produces some startling infelicities, such as in “Autumn”, where “November” and “November Songs” are followed almost immediately by “October”. The lack of progression is too discordant to ignore. It’s a crying shame, as the cover really is lovely.